Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm and annexation of the Star Wars franchise might just be one of the most significant examples of revenge on both the levels of culture and business in recent years. Back in the late ‘70s, the success of Star Wars (1977) and its forceful reconfiguration of how Hollywood related to the youth audience seemed to mock Disney in particular, as that company’s once and future status as the singular arbiter for classy children’s entertainment in the cinema was on the ebb, and now faced a phenomenon its mores could not contend with – gaudy, violent, and knowing pulp fare made by hippie film school types. So, to cash in on the new science fiction and special effects craze, Disney produced The Black Hole, a film that is remembered, which isn’t that often, as a nadir of confused intent for Disney, and a whipping boy for its dark, atypical bent and clumsy science. Recently I revisited it for the first time since childhood, and found it an odd relic indeed, but one that bore out just why I had such strong, lingering memories of it. The story is simple, as a deep space survey team aboard the spaceship Palomino discover a huge, long-lost spaceship, the Cygnus, locked in a seemingly impossible static orbit in an acausal pocket above a colossal black hole. The Palomino’s crew includes Dr Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux), whose father was on board the Cygnus when it went missing. Also aboard are terse Captain Dan Holland (Robert Forster) and his co-pilot Lt Charles Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), big brain Dr Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins), mission chronicler Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine), and the classics-reciting hovering robot V.I.N.Cent (voiced by Roddy MacDowell). The crew narrowly survive nearly being sucked into the fearsome vortex when they venture around the Cygnus and fall suddenly into its influence, and only just manage to grope their way back to the dark and menacing hulk. The seemingly derelict Cygnus abruptly lights up as if greeting them, and they dock with it.
Boarding the Cygnus, the hapless explorers find the ship’s saturnine commander Dr Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) ruling over a crew apparently composed entirely of robots. Reinhardt explains that the Cygnus was sent out on a great scientific expedition but after disaster the rest of the crew abandoned ship, leaving him to use his scientific genius to survive, eventually learning how to manipulate gravity, allowing him defy the black hole’s attraction. Now he’s planning a venture into the black hole to penetrate the last frontier of knowing. His guests, particularly Durant, are initially impressed by his achievement and intentions, but slowly a rather more terrible story emerges: Reinhardt, in his egomaniacal desire to achieve his incredible aim, has in fact used brainwashing technology to reduce all the former crew to mindless serfs encased in robotic disguises, with the aid of the actual robots on board, including Reinhardt’s minion, or possible master, a red-painted menace of a mechanoid called Maximilian. Only another robot of a similar make to V.I.N.Cent, B.O.B. (Slim Pickens) offers an ally on the Cygnus; he’s been severely damaged over the years in his altercations with the other, evil robots, and speaks with a Texas drawl because he was programmed in Houston. Realising Reinhardt intends to shanghai them all on his venture, the crew make a play to escape his clutches, whereupon Maximilian kills Durant and Reinhardt has Kate sent to be robotised, forcing her crewmates to stage a rescue as the countdown to the final plunge ticks down.
The Black Hole hovers, much like the Cygnus itself, in an uncomfortable space between cinematic worlds. The plucky heroism of V.I.N.Cent and B.O.B. and the straightforward action that takes up most of the last third fits the Disney live-action template fairly easily, particularly the studio’s films of Jules Verne’s venturesome tales like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and In Search of the Castaways (1962), casting Reinhardt as a version of Captain Nemo even more brilliant than the model but also robbed of his nobler instincts, now merely an avatar of what happens when transcendent fixation and cold technocracy fuse in purpose within an egotist’s frame. The theme of a search for a missing family member and images of desperate flight through a disintegrating world also recalls one of Disney’s more recent adventure films, the lovable Island at the Top of the World (1974). For more elevated reference, the essential plot of a mad captain planning a tilt against the void quotes that most epic of American narratives, Moby-Dick. The robots could fit neatly into any of the more juvenile Star Wars imitations, like the Gil Gerard series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. But the sepulchral grandeur of the settings and the surprisingly dark twists of its story seem more apt for the more ambitious sci-fi fare of the decade before it, building to a finale that aims for sub-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) standing as a depiction of zones of experience beyond imagining. I have the feeling that this film’s evident determination to be something more than just a quickie adventure movie cash-in on Star Wars would count for more if this hadn’t been probably the first half-way decent script for a sci-fi film Disney’s executives had within reach. The Black Hole was the first Disney film to ever score a PG rating for some extremely mild bad language and, infamously, a sequence when Maximilian attacks Durant with his memorable personal armament – whirring, glittering steel claws spun like fan blades – and rips him to pieces. Equally nightmarish is the fate of the Cygnus’ humans, still betraying signs of their true nature as flesh-and-blood creatures. Booth first begins to suspect the truth when he sees one “robot” limping, and soon the interlopers see them enacting rituals like funerals for comrades, through some remnant sense of humanity and duty. Crypto-sexuality creeps in as Kate is cocooned in silver material and subjected to a brain-frying ray about to turn her into cosmic bimbo, only to be saved in the nick of time by the good robots and Holland.
The Black Hole quite often feels like a very big budget episode of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who or Space: 1999, particularly the latter, with which it shares a certain starkness of imagery in evoking the reaches of outer space and desire to explore such zones through the eyes of human tendencies to search for meaning in apparent nullity. The early sequences essentially offer a haunted house movie on the fringe of galactic being, as our heroes zero in on the Cygnus, first glimpsed eerily suspended above the black hole’s glowing accretion disc, and then entered only to find vast, echoing corridors and cavernous emptiness, a Marie Celeste in the void, only then to find it’s inhabited by a zombie horde and their ruthless, implacable overlord, who might himself be some sort of puppet. The opening credits appear over a CGI grid field mimicking the rules of normal space that suddenly gives way to a spiralling hole in reality, with John Barry’s vertiginous score sawing ominously away, abstractly but effectively introducing the menacing dramatic, astronomical, and spiritual landscape of the story. The visuals are the strongest aspect and basic pleasure of The Black Hole. The Cygnus, viewed from without looking like a giant flying Eiffel Tower with its girder-riddled frame and cyclopean interiors, is a triumph of sci-fi design, as is Maximilian the satanic robot, with his glowing eye slit, interchangeable arms and wicked weaponry; he could well be the greatest evil robot in cinema. When, after hanging about intimidatingly in the corner of the frame as Reinhardt tries to muster enough focus to charm his guests, Maximilian suddenly snaps into action to defend the great project. His aura of real threat pays off in the image of Durand trying to hold off his terrible spinning claws with a book, paper flying before the (implied) gruesome coup-de-grace.
The Black Hole stirs a certain nostalgic respect in me, indeed, for exemplifying the special effect revolution of the period with its sense of solid grandeur, the relish of showmanship in presenting awesome sights that gives director Gary Nelson’s serviceable labours an extra boost. Barry’s sonorous score gives sonic augmentation to the atmospheric photography, the techno-medievalism of the art direction, and the tactile charm of Albert Whitlock’s model work. The script, by Jeb Rosebrook and Gerry Day, casually drops weird ideas like Kate having a psychic connection with V.I.N.Cent. But the film is foiled on several levels, particularly in the absence of any means of complicating the straightforward drama that feels, even at an hour and a half, a bit padded. The characters are very thinly sketched, chiefly relying on the professionalism of the amazingly good cast to flesh out their clichéd roles. Schell, sporting a frizzy beard, radiates Jovian power, disdainful of the merely human realm of reference who reveals an undercurrent of the shifty, even pathetic, part of him desiring release from so much damned destiny. Perkins plays a stock sci-fi figure, the cool, inquisitive but gullible scientific nerd who admires the ends for so long he doesn’t notice as the means come up to bit him on the ass. Borgnine’s increasingly panicky Booth earns himself an ignominious end when he tries to flee on the Palomino, abandoning his companions, only to end up crashing. There’s a potently lurid quality to the idea of the Cygnus being haunted by the withered remnants of its crew, and the decision to make all the antagonists robots save Reinhardt was probably partly intended to keep the film unobjectionable for young kids. But this leaves the story badly wanting for stronger drama and complication. If the film had lived up more to the influence of Moby-Dick, and portrayed Reinhardt as lording it over a mostly slavish, fanatical group of believers desperate to follow him on the path to oblivion, or if it had offered Dawn of the Dead in space, the result would have been weirder and more exciting, rather than the stodgy scenes of clunky mechanicals zapping each-other we get.
Still, striking images continue throughout, as when the ship suffers through a meteorite storm that sends one huge, glowing rock slamming through the hull and rolling up one of the interior passages, our escaping heroes dashing out of its path. As visually impressive as this moment is, it also exemplifies one oft-mocked aspect of The Black Hole, its apparent disinterest in the laws of physics: there are several scenes in the film where the humans are depicted in environments that should be airless and deadly, whilst the illustrations of the black hole itself are dubious, as it spins like a whirlpool and flashes red and blue. However, in paying attention to the dialogue, I realised some of this is explainable within the movie’s logic, because of the fact that Reinhardt is supposed to have gained power over gravity as a force. When the Cygnus is punctured, the ship’s air remains within this cocoon of influence. “Right out of Dante’s inferno,’ Booth states in awe when first seeing the black hole, foreshadowing a finale that applies religious dimensions to the 2001’s star gate sequence as the trip beyond the infinite, and The Black Hole, like Interstellar (2014) and many other recent ambitious sci-fi film was perhaps the first to really struggle to escape the shadow of Kubrick’s work when invoking the most intangible corners of the genre’s inquisitive reach. The finale takes the survivors of the melee into the fiery depths of Hades where Reinhardt finds his eternal reward encased within Maximilian’s steel frame, lording it over the damned, with the suggestion Maximilian might really have been the devil after all. An angelic form then leads the remaining heroes through cathedral-like corridors and out through a white hole, returned to normal space. To say that this climax is deliriously silly is to understate but it’s also utterly transfixing as it dares to go to a place, literally, where sense cannot follow. In no way, shape, or form is The Black Hole some kind of neglected classic, but it’s also much more than a genre punch-line.
